


all my bones coming back

by blackwood (transjon)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Eating Disorders, Established Relationship, Food Issues, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Past Relationship(s), Trans Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Trans Martin Blackwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:34:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28654326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transjon/pseuds/blackwood
Summary: It’s just that this flat makes it too easy for him.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 8
Kudos: 145
Collections: t4tma week 2021





	all my bones coming back

**Author's Note:**

> t4tma day 6 - dysphoria. 
> 
> title is from line without a hook by ricky montgomery 
> 
> eating disorders are the central theme of this fic, jons eating disorder is heavily influenced by dysphoria, martins disordered eating was caused by his mom putting him on diets as a child + the ensuing fucked up relationship with food/his body. theres discussions of bulimia/purging as well as restrictive eating. jon doesnt blame georgie for his eating disorder but he definitely associates her with the origins of it. just be careful i guess if you experience competitive eating disorder compulsions because this goes sort of hard idk

The thing about it is that it’s just so damn easy. The flat just has so many hiding spots. So many different places for him to scatter crackers and stray pieces of candy. A secret cabinet underneath the stairs. A loose floorboard. A crack between the counter and the fridge just big enough for him to fit his arm through. 

It’s not even like he’s like that anymore. He eats now. He has lunch and dinner. Some mornings, if Martin insists, he also has breakfast, but the reason he skips it is no longer guilt or disgust or anger or frustration. 

It’s just that this flat makes it too easy for him. 

Jon looks up at the ceiling. The knots in the wood painted white. The ceiling light turned off. Dim in the room. He doesn’t even like chocolate. The wrapper crinkles in his fingers. Does he like chocolate? His brows furrow. 

So the thing is – this flat makes things easy. Easy to hide food. Easy to eat alone in the dark. Easy to forget that he doesn’t live alone anymore. The dark shape in the doorway almost blends into the space behind itself. 

“Martin?” Jon asks. His mouth is still half-full of candy. It’s sticking to his teeth, now, which is bad. 

“Jon?” Martin’s face is bleary-guilty. “What’re you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” says Jon. His stomach rolls. He feels nauseous. Guilty-disgusted. “You?”

Martin blinks at him. His eyelashes are long and soft-looking in the low light. “Just woke up.”

Jon’s painfully aware of the melted chocolate coating his fingers. “You should go back to bed,” he whispers. “It’s still early.”

Martin ignores him. His arms come to wrap around Jon’s shoulders. Jon allows himself to be moved like a ragdoll. Martin wraps two big arms around him and holds him close. Jon’s cheek smushes against his chest. 

“Who are you hiding from?” Martin whispers into his hair. Jon tenses, and opens his mouth to deny he was hiding from anyone or anything, but Martin squeezes tighter. Just once. Loosens his arms again. Jon wraps his arms around Martin hesitantly. 

The answer is –

Georgie. 

Not because she made him hide. Not because she kept count of what he was eating. How much of it. When and where. But because – and this is where he falters. This is where he struggles to put it into words. 

What he knows is this: when he was in university he didn’t eat. First it was the homesickness, and then it was how busy he was, and then he forgot what being hungry was like. And then there was Georgie. And then he realized that he’d lost enough weight that he didn’t have to wear his binder anymore, which was good, because it was making his back hurt, and not wearing his binder felt better. And then, at the same time almost, he realized that he’d lost enough weight that not only did he not have to wear a binder but that when he wore the baggy shirts he’d gotten used to wearing the hems of them fell over his hips instead of settling on the curves of them. 

And then he stopped getting his period. And then, eventually, he had to shave his head. He told Georgie it was because he just wanted to look more masculine. She must’ve noticed the clumps of hair in the shower, but she never brought them up. The sharp jut of his jaw made him look nicer. More masculine. People stopped misgendering him so often. 

And this is when Georgie falls in love with him. 

Georgie sees the flat planes of his chest. The near-straight lines of his hips. Georgie looks at him and he knows she sees him. Nothing else. 

So: when he eats he eats at night. While she’s asleep in the other room. While she’s in the bathroom. While she’s in class. Georgie doesn’t tell him to eat more, and Jon doesn’t eat more, and he wouldn’t.

Of course the introspection comes later. The things about his chest and Georgie’s hands on his cheeks. The thing about Georgie’s love being transactional. When it’s happening it’s just fear, which Georgie doesn’t get, and which Jon doesn’t want to dig his fingers into. 

So: who is he hiding from? His second year of uni he joined a gym briefly. He ended up stopping going soon enough. It was a concept, he remembers. Muscles and strength. That didn’t end up happening. Many things didn’t end up happening. His brows furrowed in concentration. Georgie used to bake. Jon would put his finger on top of the electric kitchen scale and absently try to calculate the energy content of his hand. It hadn’t registered as weird back then. Sometimes he thinks about it. How it’s the only kind of math that he still can do in his head. How Martin still finds it eerie how well he can tell how much spaghetti in a hundred grams. How many grams of pecans in the palm of his hand. 

Of course the food eaten in the dark still counts. Of course it’s still real. It’s just that if he eats alone and without looking he doesn’t have to see it. It’s just that Georgie bakes and he doesn’t even like chocolate, and chocolate stains the sides of his mouth anyway. He’d promised to himself he’d never be that person eating in secret just to throw up after, not because it’d be _too_ much, but because he was strong enough to not have to eat in the first place. It’s just – the nights are long. Georgie goes to bed early. Jon sits up in the light of the bedside lamp. Inside of his pillow case he’s got a Snickers bar he’s not going to eat. In the kitchen he has a box of cereal he doesn’t eat out of, and in the hallway closet he’s got a zip-top freezer bag full of that cereal, which he eats out of, but only in the dark, because he doesn’t have to _see_. In a way it’s almost like a dream. And it’s not really that he _wants_ anything. Nothing he’s looking for. Just –

It’s heavy. Everything is so heavy. His finger on the kitchen scale. The guilt. The disgust. The _fear_. He’s afraid. He’s always so _afraid._

So who is he hiding from?

On a purely pragmatic level it’s Georgie. If Georgie sees him standing under the flickering hallway light eating fistfuls of dry cereal she’ll know. He’s never sure what she’s going to know, but she will know it anyway. Something that he doesn’t want her to know, regardless of what it is. Or, he supposes, now he’s hiding from Martin. Jon eats now. Lunch and dinner and all that. Only a few scary foods left, all of them easy to avoid. It doesn’t make sense. He’s allowed to eat now. 

But the _guilt_ , which comes from – something. From someone knowing. Someone seeing. Someone saying something. _That’s a lot_ , his grandma used to tell him. _Sure you’re going to finish all of it?_ So maybe he’s scared of that. Maybe he’s hiding from that. Not his grandma. Eyes, in general. Seeing. Being seen. Witnessed, like he’s going to get caught red-handed at a crime scene. Body still at his feet. Himself and then his body, one of which is the crime and the other of which is the scene, which is how he’s since started seeing himself. The crime and the perpetrator. Something about being chased by a cop, who is also you. 

It’s just a piece of candy. Jon doesn’t even like chocolate. 

“I don’t know,” he says softly. Martin hums. Like he knows. Like he understands. Jon presses his face carefully into the soft fabric of his washed-soft t-shirt. His heart is going rabbit-fast. Jon’s, that is. Martin’s heart isn’t going fast at all. Thump, thump. This is ridiculous, he thinks. Grown man. What are you scared of. Getting scolded for sneaking candy after brushing your teeth. 

“My mum,” says Martin instead of scolding him at all. 

Jon pulls back. “What?”

“That’s who I hide from.” Martin sighs. Shifts his weight from one leg to the other. “When I do this.”

“I’m sorry,” says Jon. He’s not sure if Martin’s going to elaborate. If he wants Jon to ask. Jon hasn’t seen him sneaking around. Hasn’t found any food stashes. Guess he’s better at it than Jon is, then. He knows some people tape candy bars to the undersides of their beds, but he knows Martin doesn’t, because he’s checked, because he used to do that. 

Martin doesn’t seem to know if he wants to elaborate either, because he sighs quietly, and then digs his nails into Jon’s back for a short second. “It’s okay.”

“Did she…?”

“Have me in Weight Watchers by the time I was ten?” Martin finishes his sentence, and then laughs. “Yeah.”

“Martin,” Jon gasps. “That’s _horrible_.”

Martin waves his hand. “Yeah, well. Been a while since that was a pressing issue, really.”

Jon hums disapprovingly. Martin’s hand strokes over the knobs of his spine, which isn’t really helping, because he’s suddenly strangely aware of how much more visible they used to be. How Georgie used to trace over the shapes of them one by one with the tip of her index finger. How it used to make Jon shiver with revulsion-pride-discomfort. “Still. You were a _child_.”

“And it didn’t even work,” Martin says airily, and then, when Jon doesn’t laugh, “too far?”

Jon gives him a little ghost of a smile. “You’re perfect.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Martin. “You and me both know that’s not the point.”

Jon closes his eyes. “If you’re hungry you should eat.”

“Not sure I am,” confesses Martin. “I just wanted to. Just to see if I could.”

Jon nods. He needs to brush his teeth. Or maybe throw up, although they might blur into one another regardless of how he chooses, because when he promised to himself he would never do that he wasn’t thinking clearly. Or maybe he was thinking clearly. He just changed. Things changed. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. 

Martin shakes his head slightly. “People told me she was probably trying to maintain control over something. And,” he sighs. His hand moves slightly against Jon’s back. “I guess that was one thing she could control? After I went on testosterone she stopped. I think,” he takes a breath, “I think because I started looking like my dad. And she didn’t want to look at me for that long anymore.”

Jon knows control. Jon doesn’t really know externalized control. Jon tries not to count how many years that makes up. How many years between ten year old Martin and Martin who’d scraped up the energy and time to pursue hormones. 

“That’s abuse,” he says softly. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Martin says, all airy and casual, which Jon knows is probably because he’s trying to not make it too real. Too heavy. Too deep-dive-into-trauma in the middle of the night in the near pitch black of their living room. “So.”

He could probably do with elaborating a bit. He doesn’t. 

“Can we go back to bed?” Jon whispers. He feels exhausted. 

“Yeah,” says Martin. “Yeah. Are you okay?”

Jon moves his tongue in his mouth. Over the surfaces of his teeth. The insides of his cheeks. His canine scrapes over the tip. Some blood trickles out of the little cut. 

“Sure,” he agrees. “Yes. Tired.”

Martin kisses the top of his head. Jon’s hands start shaking just a little bit. Martin, who notices things about him people often don’t, puts one hand over one of his. “Let’s go, then.”

Final kiss to the top of his head. Sugar sweet. Chocolate taste. In his mouth the chocolate is starting to melt into blood and saliva.


End file.
